The Gold Pet

So Blizzard finally accepted the inevitable. You can’t fight gold sellers. And if you can’t, why not try and make some money of it at least? We’ve all seen how Blizzard is creating its own ebay for Diablo 3. And soon, they will add another pet to WoW. Only this time, you can sell it for gold. Brace for the incoming flamestorm. Or, if you’re like me, don’t, because you don’t read the “right” forums.

To be honest, I am very dispassionate about the whole thing. It’s yet another pet, and not even a really cute one either. Or rather, it’s trying so hard to be cute that it looks a bit weird. And instead of buying gold from third parties, you now can buy the pet, and hope to sell it for gold, without the risk of getting your account banned. Oh noes. The sky is falling.

The question is: will it sell well enough? Blizzard increased the demand potentially by making it per-character, and not per-account. But it’s hard to gauge the demand, and that may make the prices vary wildly. Maybe at some point, there will be an official pet:gold ratio, but I doubt it. The problem is also that, if you want gold, you can invest real-world money. But it doesn’t work the other way round, because you don’t have a monetary advantage from buying the pet. That’s why PLEX work: every EVE player is naturally interested in getting their hands on them, because they will save on subscription money. But only a small subset of WoW players will be buying the pet.

So, I’m interested how this will play out. I won’t buy or sell any of them. Hell, I’m thinking about canceling my subscription for only the second time since I started playing in 2005. But I’ll watch it and maybe ask friends whether they noticed anything in that regard in a month or two.